Getting website traffic seems to be the #1 concern of most people trying to make an income on the internet.
Go on, admit it! That includes you too, doesn’t it?
I thought so…
But…I’m not psychic - by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Blind Freddie could have figured that one out in about 5 seconds, with his eyes closed… 
Seriously though, almost every single person I know who’s trying to make money using the internet craves traffic. It’s their addiction, you could say.
Why?
Simple really, website traffic = $$$
Or, to put it in different terms, the more eyeballs you have cruising through your website, the more chance you’ve got to have them buy sometime from you, or click on an ad on your website, or even sign up for your email newsletter (which you then promote products and/or services to them through that medium…don’t you???).
From an Adsense perspective, the higher your number of website visitors, the more money you make from some of them clicking on your ads.
From an affiliate marketer’s perspective, the more website traffic you get, the more sales you ultimately get.
And if you’re one of the smart ones, you’ll be selling your own products and/or services, and doing even better from all those surfers.
“Real businesses” 
can and should use website traffic to collect sales leads and sell their products and services online. Even accountants and lawyers can make money online - you don’t need to be an eBay or Amazon.com to make money on the net.
So, now that we’ve established the fact that website traffic is a GOOD THING (!), why is it that so many website owners struggle so much to actually get that traffic?
I personally believe it’s because they don’t understand a few key fundamentals about what makes the Internet work, and, they then don’t know how to properly use that knowledge and put a plan of action into place to actively and deliberately get web site traffic to their site/s.
I’m lucky in 1 respect, and that is that I work as a Search Engine Marketer for a real bricks and mortar company. That means that every day I get to play with all the key elements that are important when it comes to getting website traffic, and put them into real-world action for my clients.
These companies and individuals pay thousands of dollars to have myself and my co-workers do “that SEO thing!” on their behalf, and they expect results!
Actually, we plan for results ourselves, because we offer a money back guarantee on our SEO services, so we can’t afford to not perform. Nothing like a bit of pressure to make you get the job done right!
Now, the main reason I am writing this blog post is that there’s 2 things happening at the same time right now, and you can benefit from this day to day experience I get at work, and turn that into your own website traffic!
Firstly, I am about a week away from the launch of my new Video training product:
Website Traffic Secrets: 26 Ways To Drive Cheap Or Free Traffic To Your Website
This CD will contain over 2 Hours of narrated live screen capture video, walking you through all the different aspects of driving traffic to your websites.
It will be all laid out for you in a simple, easy-to-understand, step-by-step action plan…
In Video…
With Audio narration…
And, lots of great free and cheap resources to help you get started.
Plus, it will have my IE Favorites list, pointing you to all the sites that I use on a regular basis that can help you in your quest to get that traffic.
This is a condensed version of my work experiences over the last 12 months + 12 years of working in IT, Sales and Training. In short, you could describe it as a website traffic braindump!
There’ll be more about this CD soon…
But for now, the other thing that’s happening is that I will be adding a new article to my blog every day until the CD is launched, discussing website traffic concepts and hints/tips to get you started.
You don’t have to buy the CD when it’s launched, because it’s only for those folks that are TRULY serious about getting as much website traffic as possible.
However, for those of you just putting your toe into the water and needing a plain english introduction to the whole topic of getting website traffic, then I guarantee you’ll really get value from my upcoming articles.
So dear reader, see you back here tomorrow for article #1 (”The 2 Most Common Ways To Get Website Traffic”), and have a fantastic day!
26 year old Australian student Ori Allon - a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, has been hired by Search Engine giant Google, along with his search engine creation Orion.
Young Allon, an Israeli-born, Australian student, has been working on the next generation search engine (code named Orion) as part of his doctoral studies.
It obviously has something of interest to the Search Engine market, because the bidders on it included Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft!
All 3 courted him (and the University of NSW), before Google won the bidding process for the license to use the technology from the University (who owns the rights to any research done by its students and staff).
The Orion technology has the potential to “revolutionize existing search engines”, according to a press release put out by the University of NSW. Amongst other things, it will improve search relevence, offering terms related to what was initially searched for.
Allon has previously given an example of a search on “American Revolution”, that could return results for “american history”, “george washington”, “Boston Tea Party” and other related topics.
Allon is now working in Google’s Mountain View HQ in California, and could be a major figure in the company in the years to come, depending on how things shape up.
Naturally, SEO companies the world over will be keeping a close eye on this new development. “Every change at Google flows on down to the Search Engine Optimization market, and it should see another big shake-up of the industry”, according to Australian Search Engine Marketer Eran Malloch.
“A change to the SEO / SEM market driven by an Australian invention would be an exciting experience.” says Malloch. “I’ll eagerly await the outcome of Orion + Google - let’s see whether this gives the big G a renewed competitive advantage in their slowly dropping market share.”
I just read this interesting article by the rather famous Mr Cutts last week and have been passing it onto my clients for future reference. Rather than lose it to the vagaries of my failing memory I have decided to add it to my blog for you to read, learn and enjoy…
August 25, 2005 @ 12:29 am
I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:
Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP†and “BINARY†but the term “FTP_BINARY†doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++â€. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARYâ€! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.
That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play
-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for
other reasons. 
Welcome! This blog is the musings (and occasional ramblings) of an Australian guy working in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) fields.
I’ll discuss my thoughts on these subjects, hopefully on a daily basis. Since I work as an Internet marketing consultant for WCR Internet Marketing, I get a lot of opportunities to explore and experiment on how to get successful search engine rankings on behalf of my clients, as well as set up, run and manage their Google Adwords PPC campaigns.
Drop by, or subscribe to my RSS feed, and you’ll get all the latest goss on my Net Adventures.
Eran
